Astrid Tasks and To-do List has been a popular task management app for Android for quite some time now; it might not have been the first, but it was arguably among the best. Offering cross-platform sync, an easy to use and powerful companion web-app, Astrid really showed off how task management Android could work really well. Equally, it showed off what Google Tasks could have been if Google hadn’t ignored it.
Well it seems, like all good things, Astrid might be coming to an end of sorts. In a post on Astrid’s blog, CEO Jon Paris announced that his team would be joining Yahoo’s mobile team with the goal of “making the world’s daily habits more inspiring and entertaining”.
For existing Astrid users, Paris has announced the service will continue to work as-is for the next 90 days .. beyond that, though, who knows what will happen? In a sign that things might cease, annual subscriptions paid by users for extra storage, backup and more will receive refunds soon and those extra services will, presumably, cease to be offered.
For people — like me — who have used Astrid for years to manage their to-do lists and to stay on top of things, this is both good news and bad. Good news for the Astrid team, but bad news for us, with the likelihood that Astrid will soon bite the dust.
Google Keep gets an obligatory mention, because Google had originally offered some funding to Astrid but seemingly this wasn’t enough; Astrid now acquired by Yahoo, and Google devoting a little bit of time to Google Keep suggests that maybe Astrid wasn’t attractive enough a target for Google to acquire it (which would probably have been a better outcome for all of us).
